BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Friday, May 06, 2005
SO NOTED. ABC's
"The
Note" has taken, well, note
of an odd paragraph that appears in today's Boston Globe. It's
in the lead
story, by Frank Phillips
and Shelley Murphy, who report that former House Speaker Tom Finneran
may be on the verge of being indicted by US Attorney Michael Sullivan
on charges that he perjured himself in a civil trial related to a
racially insensitive House redistricting plan.
Near the end of the Globe
article comes this:
The case is a high-stakes
one for Sullivan, a Republican politician who once served
alongside Finneran in the Legislature. The state Republican
leadership is eager for Sullivan to run for statewide
office.
It would be perilous for
Sullivan, having launched the probe, to end it without indictment,
and risk being viewed as soft on the once politically powerful
former speaker. However, bringing indictment will provoke anger in
the political arena, and possible retaliation from other
politicians. Still, indicting Finneran, and failing to get a
conviction, could create a perception that Sullivan overreached,
and taint his reputation.
Here is what "The Note" has to say
about that second paragraph:
Is there any other
newspaper in America that would run an implication-laden paragraph
like this one from today's Boston Globe front-pager about
the reported plans of federal prosecutor Sullivan to indict former
Massachusetts Speaker Finneran for perjury?
As for the questions raised by
Phillips and Murphy, here are the answers, according to "The Note":
"(1) We don't know; (2) we really don't know, and we don't know; and
(3) NO!!!!!"
WOLFF V. SHAFER V. WOLFF.
Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff and Slate media
critic Jack Shafer are going at it hot and heavy over a
just-published Wolff piece that is apparently unkind toward both
Slate and Shafer.
Wolff's column is not online, so
the conversation is rather one-sided at this point. But Shafer takes
Wolff's head off here,
and Wolff responds here
- going so far as to challenge Shafer to prove one of his allegations
or resign. (Media Log's money is on Shafer.) Wolff tries to drag
Rory
O'Connor into it, too. So
far, O'Connor is keeping quiet - but stay tuned.
Last August, the New
Republic's Michelle Cottle came up with a pretty brutal
take
on Wolff that is,
unfortunately, available only to subscribers. But here's a paragraph
that certainly explains why Wolff disdains the "school monitor type"
of media criticism:
Much to the annoyance of
Wolff's critics, the scenes in his columns aren't recreated so
much as created - springing from Wolff's imagination rather than
from actual knowledge of events. Even Wolff acknowledges that
conventional reporting isn't his bag. Rather, he absorbs the
atmosphere and gossip swirling around him at cocktail parties, on
the street, and especially during those long lunches at Michael's.
"He's around town enough to have those insights, to spot people,
to come across [pieces of information]," says a friend. He
also has a talent for making the most of even the briefest
encounters. "His great gift is the appearance of intimate access,"
says an editor who has worked with Wolff. "He is adroit at making
the reader think that he has spent hours and days with his
subject, when in fact he may have spent no time at all." More than
one chapter of Wolff's 2003 book, Autumn of the Moguls,
spotlights anecdotes about random mogul sightings in his
neighborhood. In contrast to The New Yorker's Ken Auletta,
whose sympathetic portrayals of media moguls have allowed him to
enter their inner sanctums, Wolff does not confer with the titans
he covers. He channels them.
I've met Wolff twice - once at the
2000 Democratic National Convention, in Los Angeles, where
then-Phoenix reporter Seth Gitell (now Tom Menino's chief
spokesman) and I ran into him in a Starbucks at breakfast time, and
once on the set of WGBH-TV's Greater Boston. Both times he was
polite, even charming. I've never met Shafer, but we've exchanged
e-mails, I've interviewed him by phone, and, I note strictly by way
of disclosure, he's said some
nice things about me. So
yes, it's an incestuous little world in which we live.
In any event, I suspect this is a
long way from being over.
posted at 11:49 AM |
4 comments
|
link
4 Comments:
perhaps i'm coffee deprived. but i read the note and it seems as though the three answers refer to three questions, with only the third refering to the globe.
for a straight newspaper like the globe to insert that kinda 'analysis' without attribution is ... not right, i think. but i guess you can get away without making phone calls at the velvet coffin. sigh.
"Since its founding, the press-critic racket has been dominated by liberals and leftists whose critiques have usually owed more to their political mind-sets than to the media they consume. On the litmus issues of big business, unions, "social justice," oligopoly, civil liberties, regulation, "reactionary" movements, markets, bias, foreign intervention, and the tyranny of centrism, to name just a few, the press critiques of most left-leaning writers could easily be mistaken for political tracts."
Guy has a point...
[b]Wolffy[/i]
For somebody who allegedly couldn't write, I've enjoyed Wolff's stuff since he came on board @[i]VF[/i]sometime in '05. If he operates in some kind of journalistic netherword I'd say that's a problem for his editors to keep an eye on. But IMO,he's good.
"Since its founding, the press-critic racket has been dominated by liberals and leftists whose critiques have usually owed more to their political mind-sets than to the media they consume."
Nooooooo! Couldn't be, eh Dan.
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
